REGILAUL in the POLITICAL WHIRLPOOL: on COLLECTING REGILAUL in NORTHEAST ESTONIA in the SECOND HALF of the 1950S
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https://doi.org/10.7592/FEJF2017.67.saarlo REGILAUL IN THE POLITICAL WHIRLPOOL: ON COLLECTING REGILAUL IN NORTHEAST ESTONIA IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1950S Liina Saarlo Abstract: The article is dedicated to the history of the monumental regilaul publication Vana Kannel and examines the changing position of regilaul in the research politics of Soviet Estonia in the 1950s. The changing form of fieldwork expeditions is dealt with, as the collection of regilaul was seen as a part of the preparation process of the publication. Concentrating on the series of fieldtrips to Alutaguse region in the second half of the 1950s, objectives and details of fieldwork are scrutinized to pinpoint the reasons for the failure of the endeavour. The fundamental question the article examines is the interaction between the dominating ideologies of research politics and the individual interests of folklore collectors. Keywords: academic source publication, fieldwork, regilaul, research politics, singer, Soviet studies INTRODUCTION Since the nineteenth century, collecting and publishing regilaul, the old Esto- nian oral song tradition, has been one of the pillars of Estonian national move- ment, and one of the main building blocks in the construction of ethnic identity. Jakob Hurt (1839–1907), the leading figure of Estonian national movement, initiator of nationwide folklore collecting in Estonia (see Jaago 2005), saw it as his mission to return to Estonians the collected folklore in the form of an academic publication series – Monumenta Estoniae antiquae. The first part of this series, Vana Kannel (‘The Old Psaltery’), is a series of published regilaul corpora of Estonian parishes. The regilaul corpus from Alutaguse region (Jõhvi and Iisaku parishes), in the core of northeast Estonian folk song tradition, was published in volume VIII of Vana Kannel (Kokamägi & Tedre & Tuvi 1999). The history of collecting folklore is unique in each parish, containing episodes of collectors’ fieldwork and collecting campaigns from different periods, and shaped by different ideologies and principles. Ülo Tedre, one of compilers of the eighth volume, wrote in the http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol67/saarlo.pdf Liina Saarlo preface that the sequence of fieldtrips to northeast Estonia in the second half of the 1950s, organised and carried out by the Folklore Section at the Institute of Estonian Language and Literature,1 was motivated by the decision in 1955 to continue the publication of the Vana Kannel series. The purpose of the fieldwork was to record regilaul and gather information about former folk singers (Tedre 1999a: 6). This article focuses on a particular episode in the collecting history of Alu- taguse regilaul as well as on the several explicatory circumstances in the history of Estonian folklore studies and especially in the research of regilaul, which have come to light in the context of Ülo Tedre’s comments. The aim of the ar- ticle is to elucidate how the temporal and spatial decisions, official purposes and personal agendas, and the used collecting methods affected the quality and quantity of documented folklore material and regilaul corpus of Alutaguse region in general. RESEARCH POLITICS The processes of sovietisation and the state of the intelligentsia in the first dec- ades of occupation in Soviet Estonia have been examined thoroughly by Estonian historians. The concept of sovietisation is used in post-sovietology to characterise the processes during which Estonian society was re-institutionalised, using the political models of the Soviet Union. Restructuration took place on economi- cal and social as well as cultural levels (Tannberg 2007; Mertelsmann 2012: 9–25), using strong ideological pressure (Sirk 2004: 67). On a larger scale, the discourse of post-colonialist – especially Soviet colonialism – studies, introduced to literary studies from social sciences, seems to suit well to characterise the processes in the academic structures of Soviet Estonia (Annus 2012: 34–35). Both discourses emphasise the complexity of the sovietisation/colonisation pro- cess and the importance of cultural restructuration. Inspired by both of these discourses, the fundamental question in this article is how different ideologies implicated folkloristic fieldwork in Estonia in the 1950s, especially the collection and representations of regilaul, a genre loaded with national ideologies throughout the century. Authors of both discourses emphasise the importance of individual adaption, resistance, or self-colonisation (Sirk 2004: 68; Annus 2011: 21–22). The article focuses on relational links of motivations and principles of collectors with official collecting policies, exam- ining which ones of their fieldwork practices and decisions were imposed by dominating ideologies, and which ones by individual preferences. 116 www.folklore.ee/folklore On Collecting Regilaul in Northeast Estonia in the Second Half of the 1950s With the beginning of the Soviet occupation in 1940,2 the system of academic institutions in Estonia underwent significant reorganisation. In the indepen- dent Republic of Estonia, there had been two institutions involved in research into folklore: the responsibility of the Estonian Folklore Archives (EFA)3 was the collecting and preservation of folklore, while the responsibility of the Chair of Estonian and Comparative Folklore4 at the University of Tartu (UT) was education in folklore studies. In Soviet Estonia, the EFA was incorporated into the State Literary Museum of the Estonian SSR5 (SLM), founded in 1940, and renamed the Department of Folkloristics (DF) in 1944. In the post-World War II period, new academic institutions, the ones that would conform to the structure of academic institutions in the Soviet Union, were established. In 1946, among other institutes founded under the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR, the Institute of Language and Literature (ILL) came into being, and became the centre of academic research related to Estonian language, literature, and folklore. Next year the Folklore Section (FS) of the Institute of Language and Literature started its activities6 under the lead of Eduard Laugaste (1909–1994).7 The Literary Museum remained a “conservation institution”, which managed the archives and had the function of working, as it were, “in the service of science”. Together with the Chair of Estonian Literature and Folklore (CELF)8 at the UT, there were altogether three institutions in Estonia that were involved in collecting and studying folklore to a greater or lesser degree. All three were involved in a determined and agreed-upon range of practices, in thematic as well as geographical terms.9 The late 1940s and early 1950s were convoluted and gloomy years in Estonian educational and cultural life. The post-war years for a breather came to an end in 1947, with the start of a witch hunt for the “traitors” in the Soviet repub- lics, which lasted until Stalin’s death.10 There were persecution and cleansing campaigns that aimed, in their rhetoric, to “liberate” universities, academic institutions, creative unions, etc. from “bourgeois nationalism”, “formalists”, “cosmopolitans”, etc. The pretexts were unspecific enough and thus could have applied to anybody.11 This state of fear and insecurity had an important role in discussing the direc- tions and tasks of academic research: these were not simple choices, guided by research trends but obligatory topics that a person had to pursue. Otherwise the least that could happen was a loss of salary level or even the academic position. In the early 1950s, folklore studies in Soviet Estonia ideologically focused on collecting contemporary, i.e. Soviet-period, folklore. The emphatic interest towards contemporary “Soviet” folklore served as if a means against the prec- edent folkloristics, during which the “tendentious” research focused on archaic folklore (i.e. classical genres of folklore such as regilaul, folk tale, legend, etc.) Folklore 67 117 Liina Saarlo and ignored contemporary folklore on class struggle and the friendship of Es- tonians and Russians (Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu 1953: 8). The material catego- rised as Soviet folklore included various workers’ songs on political themes, World War II soldier songs, satire targeted at the “retrograde element”, etc.12 Thus attempts were made to collect workers’ lore in the mining and industrial regions of northeast Estonia,13 students visited collective farms to practise collecting folklore,14 etc. Still, these collecting activities cannot be considered a success, since very little of specific folklore was collected or “wrong” material was mistakenly recorded (Ahven 2007: 98–99; Oras 2008b: 62–63; Kulasalu 2014). After Stalin’s death in 1953, the forced interest in Soviet folklore dimin- ished and folklorists were able to return to collecting and studying classical folklore genres (e.g. Eesti NSV 1965: 271). Still, ignoring topical subjects or remaining apolitical was not an option back then. While discussing archaic genres, folklorists learned to present the “correct” facts, emphasising mainly topics concerned with social inequality under class struggle. Among the new, and favoured, research topics that emerged were the life and work of Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803–1882), the author of the Estonian national epic Kalevipoeg (Kalev’s Son), heroic legends connected with the latter, and topics related to (emphatically positive) relations between Estonian and Russian na- tions (e.g., Ahven 2007: 162, 175). THE POSITION OF REGILAUL IN THE